View attachment 238786
Above is a picture of my Anker Solix Home Power Panel and F3800 + BP3800 setup. There are a few notable differences between my setup and most of the other setups you see in the many YouTube videos about this.
1. Mine is not in the garage or basement near the main electrical panel. This is because I live in Arizona so it would just be way too hot to put this setup in my garage. Afterall, the high operating temperature specs for all these equipment are for 40C or 104F top. Even though I've seen my F3800 operate inside my car's hatchback (EVSE charging my Chevy Volt still operating at 130C just fine, but for sure I don't want it to be long term inside my garage where the temperature can easily climb to 110F in the summer.
2. My setup is indoors (where it's nice and cool) in a little nook right by the kitchen area. I take advantage of the fact that my kitchen oven outlet of 240V on a 40A circuit breaker is unused because I have a gas stove, so I just plug an RV 240V Nema 14-50P 50A 6 AWG extension cord into this kitchen oven outlet that is connected to my main electrical panel with a 40A breaker. This way I don't need to hire an electrician to run a dedicated power line from the Anker Home Power Panel out to the main panel (that is 50 ft away) and add a new breaker. I would say that this is the key enabling factor to allow me to do my Anker HPP/F3800/BP3800 indoors at minimal cost. I don't think my home loads would ever exceed 40A during Time of Use anyway (I have gas stove, gas furnace, gas dryer, gas water heater), so tapping into this 40A 240V oven outlet should suffice for me.
3. Obviously I do not opt to use a backup load subpanel for critical load circuit backup in an outage. That setup is strictly optional. The main purpose of my setup is only for Time of Use mode money savings. I don't have an issue with power outage where I live. Maybe every other year, there might be a short (less than an hour) power outage that I can live with. If I ever need longer term backup for outages, I can always disconnect the F3800s from the Home Power Panel and run them as stand-alone backup batteries with extension cords to the fridge/freezer and other appliances.
4. Although I was able to avoid running a power line from the Home Power Panel out to the main electrical panel by utilizing the 40A 240V unused oven outlet less than 10 feet away from where my HPP is, I still needed to run the 2 Current Transformer wires that clip on my 2 main grid power lines back to where the Home Power Panel is. The supplied CT twisted pair wires are only 16 ft long. But they can be spliced and extended for longer runs if necessary (I think up to 100 ft, but I only need another 50 ft). The same CT wires (20 AWG rated at 600V) sold by a third party is $220 for 100 ft long before shipping cost. So I bought straight 18 awg wires rated for 600V on Amazon for under $30 and twisted them up myself. The challenge was how to run them from the main panel to where my HPP is indoors. Luckily my home is prepared with an empty conduit for solar wires (if I choose to install them later) in the attic out to a recessed box just a few feet from the main panel, so I was able to make use of this empty conduit to feed the CT wires to where my HPP is inside.
5. So now I can set up my Time of Use options in the HPP so that the 2 F3800s and 2 BP3800s will power my whole house (via AC coupling controlled by the HPP) during peak hours, then have the HPP recharge them during Super Off Peak hours. I have a 12000 BTU window AC in my great room, and with 2 F3800s and 2 BP3800s, I can keep this window AC running at max power for 6 hours straight during the peak time and still have about 35% charge left when Super Off Peak time resumes. We use induction stove top for cooking to keep the kitchen cooler (compared to gas cooking) and this uses the battery power as well. I have a Micro-Air EasyStart Flex soft starter on order for my 4 ton central AC. Once it's installed, I should be able to run it during the Peak hours as well to cool the whole house, instead of just running the 12K BTU window AC to cool the great room. But with only 15.4 KWH from my batteries, I can probably run the 4 ton AC for only 3.5 hours before I'm out of battery juice. Hey, but at least I have that option that I can use judiciously during peak hours.
6. A few things to note about Time of Use limitations with the Anker setup. In off-grid backup load mode, you can expect to get the full 6000W from each F3800, totaling 12 KW for 2 F3800s to power your whole house. HOWEVER, in Time of Use mode, the Anker HPP will derate the power down to 1.92 KW for 1 F3800, double it to 3.84 KW of power for 1 F300 + 1 BP3800, or for 2 F3800s. If you have 1 F3800 + 2 BP3800, or 2 F3800 + 1 BP300, then the derating allows 5.76 KW output. If you have more than this, like 1 F3800 and 3 or more BP3800s, or 2 F3800s and 2 or more BP3800s, then the derating is increased to 6 KW top. This is only half of the supposed 12 KW max you're supposed to get with 2 F3800s. The reason Anker gives to justify this derating is that it's designed like that to help prolong the battery life of the whole setup. I think it's a cap on purpose, not due to any physical limitation, because obviously in grid-down backup mode, there's no cap at all. Perhaps the rationale is that grid-down backup is infrequent enough that an all-out no-cap no-limitation is more justifiable than regular daily time-of-use scenarios, at least in terms of preservation for battery longevity.
7. This limitation does put a little damper into my setup because my 4 ton central AC does draw around 4000 W of power, so I would only have around 2000 W of power left (out of my 6000 W derated cap) for use on other things such as induction cooking, etc. On top of that, this 2000 W of power actually means 1000 W of power on each of the 120V leg. So if I have 2 loads of 1000 W of 2 different legs, it'd be OK. But if the 2 loads of 1000 W each are both on the same leg, then it wouldn't be enough.
8. Another worth observation is that with most generator setup in a grid-down situation, you'd need a soft starter on your 3 or 4 ton and up central AC for a generator to be able to run it without choking due to the initial in-rush current. But for an Anker Time of Use scenario (not a grid-down scenario), a soft starter is not necessary to be installed on the central AC compressor, because the grid is still available to supply the large in-rush current that the AC compressor demands, but right after that, the F3800s will take over and run the AC on battery power. Now if your Time of Use plan is just a higher energy cost setup during peak time, this large in-rush current is so short that it wouldn't cost you much in terms of total energy anyway. But if your Time of Use plan is a "Demand" type plan that punishes you for a more instantaneous "peak" demand draw in terms of KW draw, and the grid meter is fast enough to capture this "peak in-rush" draw (remains to be seen), then a soft starter to reduce this in-rush might be beneficial to avoid steep instantaneous demand penalties.
9. When the Peak time is over, if you use the (regular) Off Peak mode in your Time of Use planning, it will not recharge the battery. Make sure you use the Super Off Peak mode if you want it to recharge your batteries. It'll recharge at the max rate of 2.77 KW for each of the F3800 and BP3800 combination you have. In my case, it 2x 2.77 KW = 5.5 KW for 2 F3800 + 2 BP 3800s.
10. Super Off Peak recharging of the batteries is always up to 100%. There's no option to set the state of charge to something lower in this mode. But there's a manual workaround if you want to stop charging at a certain SOC. For example, if you prefer for the HPP to stop charging the batteries at 80%, then set the Battery Reserve to 80% and switch from Time of Use mode to Self Consumption mode. The batteries will be charged up by the grid to 80% and then stopped there. The Self Consumption mode has a hard stop at the Battery Reserve and will not self consume below it. At this point, the grid will supply power to the home loads because the batteries are not allowed to self consume past this Battery Reserve level. Of course this will take away the automation for Time of Use. But it's helpful if you don't want to have the batteries at 100% SOC over the weekend in order to help preserve the life of the batteries. Then before the Peak time on Monday resumes, manually switch back to Time of Use mode before then to resume Time of Use for the next 5 weekdays.
I'm personally on a Demand time-of-use plan, not just a regular Peak time-of-use plan, so my off peak energy rate is the lowest pricing with my power company (currently at 5.6 cents per kwh). However, any instantaneous peak demand draw will be penalized heavily. But with this Time of Use mode that I have, it works out very well for my use case. In the winter months, there are 2 peak periods (from 5-9 am then 5-9 pm), so the level of Time of Use automation that the HPP setup does for me is doubly convenient.
I don't use any solar or plan to use any because my Super Off Peak rate of 5.6 cents per kwh is so cheap that I can't really justify the cost of solar over this cheap rate. I'd rather use that money to buy more BP3800 expansion battery for my setup instead, when they go on sale cheap enough. But if somebody has a load-side-tap solar setup, the Anker HPP does include a current transformer to monitor this solar load and judiciously combine its use with the battery usage to enable optimal self-consumption mode to use up the power produced by the solar and then save any excess solar power into the batteries if the home loads can't use it all up. Line-side-tap solar setups cannot take advantage of this solar load monitoring and optimized usage, however.
